The future of technical advice

My experience with Technical Advice IRC Meetings was that it was 1 hour a week, and you don't always manage to find the person who can answer your question.

I wonder if the easy solution is to make it "socially acceptable" to simply ask for technical advice on the wikitech-ambassadors mailing list. That would allow everybody to ask their technical questions without needing to wake up for 2pm German time.

Yes, my post above was a direct response to the announcement email (which was cross-posted to Ambassadors)! The announcement linked to this page and not everybody over there was interested in the IRC meetings so I replied over here instead.

If we make it common for people to ask questions on Ambassadors, the technology is very different but the workflow is similar. On IRC, what typically happens is that when a volunteer comes in to ask a question, the hosts would start looking for the person who knows the answer, then the answerer will discuss the problem with the asker on the IRC channel.

This would not be so different with a mailing list workflow: someone can ask a question, the staff devs will look for someone who can answer the question, and the answerer can reply either on-list or off-list depending on whether they think the question will be of interest to many people. Socially I think it's the same workflow.

Chiming in as an outsider, I don't know the exact scope and don't follow the wikitech-ambassadors list, however I'd like to express that I'm always worried about more venue fragmentation. We have existing places for asynchronous communication, like mail:wikitech-l or mail:mediawiki-l when it comes to mailing lists (not sure their scope fits exactly though), or meta:Tech, or Project:Support_desk.

m:Tech/Ambassadors - this community has been going for a few years (reps of each WMF wiki coming together for tech support and advice in both directions), and tech advice IRC meetings were always advertised there!

Hmmm, the current mailing list mail:wikitech-ambassadors is currently very-low-quantity & high-importance information, and I'd worry about changing that, because it might cause some Tech Ambassadors to unsubscribe.

E.g. the list's description says "This mailing list is used to disseminate information and share experiences regarding large-scale technology deployments in Wikimedia projects.", and that doesn't cover most of the types of topics that TAIM used to answer.

Wikitech-ambassadors@ also has an unknown number of Professional-level devs subscribed to it, so I think that many questions that might be asked there would either go unanswered, or only be able to be answered by the 1 or 2 people who always know (or where to find) the answers.

I think the ideas that AKlapper wrote above might be more ideal solutions, but I'm not sure.

the meeting is generally open for everyone and any technical question about MediaWiki, gadgets and tools. If you already have something in mind that you want to ask / talk about, you could add your topic on the page under "Add your topic and name" so the mentors could prepare if applicable.

We do not have a specific topic in each meeting. It's more like a Q&A session for users that come to us with their ad-hoc topics/questions and then we discuss them in the IRC channel during the meeting time. - I hope that makes things more clear for you:-).

Hi Birgit. Thanks. Look forward to your suggestions. 5AM my time would already be OK, I wake up early some days. And please check DST (wouldn't want to see it 5AM, then DST happens and it moves to 3AM again).:-)

Hi @Gryllida, not yet, it will take us a while to discuss this, sorry! We only can offer a second meeting if we're 100% sure we have the resources/time to do that regularly. Moving the current time of the meeting most likely isn't an option, as it works pretty well for some regions including our own (Europe, Africa, South America, parts of Asia ...) (but of course not for all). But if you have anything urgent, you could also ask at , some of the hosts of the Technical Advice IRC Meeting are answering there as well:-). I won't be around in the next 2 weeks, but I'll continue discussing this with the team when I'm back!

I've already pinged @THE IT at de.wikisource.org about this, as he's the only person at that wiki who can install gadgets. @Mpaa, @Hesperian, @Zhaladshar: The English Wikisource has no interface administrators, which means that you cannot fix scripts or install gadgets. I think you will want to change that ASAP.

Hi everyone. Please don't waste your time trying to understand everything Od1n and I have talked about on frwp: the French Wikipedia is special, in that it has had an alternative implementation of the 2006 toolbar for years, which is much more used than the mediawiki.toolbar which is being retired. A good part of our problems is the result of this.

I sent todays mail to it but it got stuck in the filter since I'm not on the list. Are you an admin of the list? If so can you please set me to the whitelist? Then I don't need to subscribe to yet another mailinglist. Thanks!

Archive previous years e.g. 2017

Just a little concern, is it possible to archive previous years like 2017 in order to make the page (logs) too long? This will make users focus on the current year if they want to read something and in case they need previous years, they can just search the archives. Thanks!

Hi! I'm not involved with the people organising this meeting, but am curious:)
In the Wikidata case, there are quarterly meetings happening already (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Events#IRC_office_hours ), so is your suggestion to make one of those entirely centered around a specific community use case? If so, maybe reaching out directly to the organisers of those could help.
There's also a lot of other meetings being organized, that are usually listed at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours , that you can join and/or ask whether those could accommodate your request, if the organisers agree with you.

Hi @ShakespeareFan00, that's a good idea! As for Wikidata, this could be organised very easily, as one of the people also working on Wikidata is already hosting the Technical Advice IRC meeting. On the other hand I think there are already plenty opportunitys for people who want to build tools and other stuff for Wikidata to get advice from Wikidata devs or others, thereas I'm not aware of anything similar for Wikisource. Do you have a guess for how many developers around Wikisource a special office hour could be interesting? On our side, I would need to discuss this idea with my colleagues first, but I definitely think it's worth thinking about it more.

The IRC meetings Elitre mentioned above are mostly "state of art" meetings with focus on a specific product or corner of Mediawiki & seldom offers for volunteer devs and their projects. So it's probably not what you're looking for (if I understood you correctly), but still maybe worth to check if there is something that's interesting for you, too.

I'm not sure, but a concern has been expressed in the past that certain development efforts had been focused on Wikipedia related functionality, as opposed to "other projects". I am not aware how many active developers there are for Wikisource related things, but I (not a developer) had filed a number of Phab tickets that got (not always favourable) responses, related to issues I'd run into with Wikisource related use cases.

A few of the issues at Wikisource , would not arise at Wikipedia, because it doesn't try to do somethings that are encountered more often on Wikisource. One issue I encountered was that currently ProofreadPage's managment strategy for tracking things directly in page text isn't ideal. A technical meeting focusing on Wikisource would enable the relevant concerns to be expressed to developers, and a "better" content model developed.

I have some other related "ehanchements" related to Wikisource that I'd also like to talk with Mediawiki/Wikimedia developers about. Like for example, it's not currently straightforward to pull content such as quote directly from page text cross-wiki. Wikisource supports LST internally between Wikisources, but not necesarily with other Wikis. (Aside: Also being able to use certain templates cross-wiki would be immensely useful beyond wikisource. It would mean that certain projects could pull a template from say Commons without needing to have a local copy, even if the media was still locally hosted on a specfic project)~~~~

Ah, okay, sorry I misunderstood you! Well, for this kind of request the Technical Advice IRC meeting wouldn't be the right place, as the goal of the meeting is to support volunteer developers who have questions around their own projects. But you could discuss your idea with the Wikisource Community, and then ask at m:IRC_office_hours or on Wikitech-L if someone would like to organize such a session. Best, Birgit